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First POST: Caught

Monday, November 12 2012

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: How the FBI used a trail of emails to unravel disgraced CIA Director David Petraeus' affair; a simple web app to watch Mitt Romney's Facebook friends disappear; and more in today's roundup of news about technology in politics from around the web.

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First POST: Caught

An FBI investigation into threatening e-mails uncovered the affair between CIA Director David Petraeus and his biographer Paula Broadwell. The New York Times reported:

The involvement of the F.B.I., according to government officials, began when Ms. Kelley, alarmed by about half a dozen anonymous e-mails accusing her of inappropriate flirtatious behavior with Mr. Petraeus, complained to an F.B.I. agent who is also a personal friend. That agent, who has not been identified, helped get a preliminary inquiry started ... Because the sender’s account had been registered anonymously, investigators had to use forensic techniques — including a check of what other e-mail accounts had been accessed from the same computer address — to identify who was writing the e-mails. Eventually they identified Ms. Broadwell as a prime suspect and obtained access to her regular e-mail account. In its in-box, they discovered intimate and sexually explicit e-mails from another account that also was not immediately identifiable. Investigators eventually ascertained that it belonged to Mr. Petraeus ...

They learned that Ms. Broadwell and Mr. Petraeus had set up private Gmail accounts to use for their communications, which included explicit details of a sexual nature, according to U.S. officials. But because Mr. Petraeus used a pseudonym, agents doing the monitoring didn't immediately uncover that he was the one communicating with Ms. Broadwell.

On Saturday, the Romney campaign sent out its first "Thank You" tweet and e-mail.

Michael Donohoe, an engineering director at Quartz News, has created a website tracking "unlikes" on Romney's Facebook page in the wake of his election loss.

Ad Age interviewed the designer behind Obama campaign banner ads. Buzzfeed reported, "Every night, Obama's analytics team would run the campaign 66,000 times on a computer simulation. 'And every morning,' said Messina, 'we would come in and spend our money based on those simulations.' Their models ultimately predicted Florida results within 0.2%, and Ohio within 0.4%. The only state they got wrong, noted Messina, was Colorado, 'where we got one more point than we thought we would.'

Half of young voters cast their ballots, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, and 60 percent of those voted for Obama.

Securities and Exchange Commission staffers left some of their computers vulnerable to cyber-attacks, Reuters reported.

In Wired commentary, Hamadoun Touré, Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union, writes about his views on proposed Internet regulations to be discussed at the World Conference on International Telecommunications.

Buzzfeed profiled Dronestagram, which documents the sites of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

The Atlantic detailed how a Facebook campaign helped lead to 4,000 write-in votes for Charles Darwin in a Georgia House race to mock Republican Rep. Paul Broun, who sits on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, for stating in an online video that evolution, embryology, and the Big Bang were "lies straight from the pit of hell."

The AP suggests that Estonia, with its online voting system, could be a model for the election issues Obama said in his speech he wanted to address.

But, but but! The same article acknowledges three key problems: Estonia's model is based on a national ID card, which would be problematic to have in the United States; when states have tried electronic voting, they've been deeply concerned by vulnerability to attack; and very few other countries have had any success with electronic voting.

Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan explained in detail why Google seemed to personalize search results based on "Obama" searches, but not based on "Romney" searches.

Betabeat reported via Reddit that Rick Santorum's Patriot Voices website appears to include a photo of 4Chan creator Chris Poole. The website was created by a web design firm on behalf of Nationbuilder.

The developer of surveillance software that, according to some reports, has been used by repressive regimes, has defended the product and pointed to the ways authorities have used the tools to protect lives.

British Prime Minister David Cameron is testing a mobile application to keep track of government affairs such as jobs and housing data as well as polls and social media posts. According to the developers of the tool, "He liked it so much, he was looking forward to showing it to President Obama at the G8 summit."

A report found that around 15 million people in Britain lack basic online skills.

A British report said it was naive for the government to expect "an army of armchair auditors" to examine raw spending posted online for waste because it was largely unusable, the BBC reported.

The Australian government is backing away from plans for a national Internet filter, but still plans to block sites related to child abuse.

The Indian government is introducing a new and improved version of a cheap tablet computer aimed at colleges and universities.

A German public broadcaster based in East Germany on Saturday live-tweeted the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

Chicago's "black site"; The New York Times reports "little guys" like Tumblr and Reddit have won the fight for net neutrality but fails to mention Free Press or Demand Progress; Hillary Clinton fan products on Etsy to inspire campaign slogans?; and much, much more. GO